Vatican: 848 priests defrocked for abuse since '04

ASSOCIATED PRESS

May 7, 2014 12:01 AM

FILE - In this Monday, May 5, 2014, file photo, the Vatican's United Nations ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, arrives prior to the U.N. torture committee hearing on the Vatican, at the headquarters of the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in the Palais Wilson, in Geneva. Tomasi revealed comprehensive statistics for the first time Tuesday on how the Vatican has disciplined priests accused of raping and molesting children, saying 848 priests have been defrocked and another 2,572 given lesser sanctions over the past decade. (AP Photo/Keystone, Salvatore Di Nolfi, File)Keystone

ASSOCIATED PRESS

May 7, 2014 12:01 AM

GENEVA -- The Vatican revealed Tuesday that over the past decade, it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties.

Church officials were providing the first ever breakdown of how they handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported to the Holy See since 2004.

The Vatican's U.N. ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, released the figures during a second day of grilling by a U.N. committee monitoring implementation of the U.N. treaty against torture.

Tomasi insisted that the Holy See was only obliged to abide by the torture treaty inside the tiny Vatican City State, which has a population of only a few hundred people.

But significantly, he didn't dispute the committee's contention that sexual violence against children can be considered torture. Legal experts have said that classifying sexual abuse as torture could expose the Catholic Church to a new wave of lawsuits since torture cases in much of the world don't carry statutes of limitations.

Tomasi also provided statistics about how the Holy See has adjudicated sex abuse cases for the past decade. The Vatican in 2001 required bishops and religious superiors to forward all credible cases of abuse to Rome for review after determining that they were shuffling pedophile priests from diocese to diocese rather than subjecting them to church trials. Only in 2010 did the Vatican explicitly tell bishops and superiors to also report credible cases to police where local reporting laws require them to.

The Vatican statistics are notable in that they show how the peaks in numbers over the years -- both of cases reported and sanctions meted out -- roughly parallels the years in which abuse scandals were in the news.